Google Is Forcing You to Switch to HTTPS by October or Lose Rankings

By Sean

HTTPS is certainly something that Google was gently pushing last year. They were incentivizing early adopters of HTTPS. Not only does HTTPS get the “Secure” marking from Chrome, it also actually helps you secure your website better.

That’s not the main point of this post though. You see, earlier today, Google sent out emails to Search Console users and the main gist of the email is that if you have a non-HTTPS website, then you have to adopt HTTPS before October or you risk losing traffic and have a “NOT SECURE” notification pop-up on your website for Chrome users.

Full disclosure: Here’s the email that Google sent out to Search Console users. Obviously, we’re all going to get different messages because we all manage different websites but the message is the same: Adopt HTTPS by October 2017 or suffer.

I’m an early adopter for HTTPS and I’ve written many articles about its benefits. Basically speaking, HTTPS helps your website be more secure which is reflected by the “SECURE” notification that Chrome displays for HTTPS sites.

HTTPS is safe, HTTP is not

Basically speaking, the reason for Google’s push towards HTTPS is website security. Earlier this year, Google sent out notifications that secure-data must be secured. This includes, but is not limited to sites that collect customer data such as credit-card information and even personal information.

HTTP basically allows unauthorized people to tap into your computer and steal all of your valuable information.

Google wants to avoid that by strongly encouraging the shift to HTTPS.

Key Takeaway

The weird thing is, Google was never this pushy about HTTPS. They were encouraging the shift by dangling rewards and increase in visibility as well as rankings. Obviously, the “nice” approach wasn’t working out as fast as they wanted to which prompted their sudden 180.

The email clearly stated that the new warning is a part of Google’s long-term plan to mark all pages served over HTTP to be marked as “not secure” so now, people HAVE to change to HTTPS by October or risk losing traffic and being marked as such.

My opinion on the matter is that you should definitely adopt HTTPS before then. Not only will you be ahead of your competition, you will also be able to adjust to the changes before everyone else can.

So what are you waiting for, contact your developers and switch to HTTPS today! Better yet, make the change yourself by reading how I made the jump to HTTPS when nobody else was.

Comments

Thank you for sharing this helpful information. Many people don’t know about this information for that in this post give some explanation in deeply that helpful and useful for many people. I like this post and also helpful for me.

Google has repeatedly stated that they are giving more benefits to people who adopt HTTPS. This includes being indexed over HTTP-sites as well as HTTPS being a “lightweight” ranking signal – if the 2014 announcement has been updated secretly, then we wouldn’t know.

Here’s the thing though: Reading between the lines, Google is being adamant about making the change. They’re going to start with marking your website as non-secure and then moving on to eventually devaluing your website or take other similar drastic actions.

I understand what you’re trying to tell me, because that’s what I do – I do my best to understand things. What I need you to understand is that SEO and “understanding” Google is at least 50% guesswork as well as keeping up with what little scraps Google throws out every now and then.

I will acknowledge that I can be wrong, but then again I’ve been doing this for years and I’m still here :) I hope my reply lets you understand my point of view on this matter.

Do you know if Google will penalise a website immediately if they have not changed to https? The reason I am asking is, I am in the process of developing a new site for a client who has an old site which is HTTP. We haven’t changed this as I would have to manually change all the internal links on the site to HTTPS and that would take days to do, and what would be the point if we would go live with the new site end of October.